The Horse We Rode in on

Dan Patch strode out of the Midwest to become a record breaker in the mile. Courtesy of Harness Racing Museum, Goshen, N.Y.

By Charles Leerhsen

Excerpted from Crazy Good: The True Story of Dan Patch, the Most Famous Horse in America, by Charles Leerhsen (Simon & Schuster, June 2008). © 2008 by Charles Leerhsen

Harness horses have not made front-page headlines across the nation since fast food meant oysters and fat people populated porn. Racehorses of any ilk don't linger in the mass media these days unless they have terribly cute names or sad stories involving shattered cannon bones or kids with cancer. The sports and pop-cultural paradigms have shifted so radically that it is difficult to wrap one's mind around the truth: A harness horse; a pacer named Dan Patch, was the most celebrated American sports figure in the first decade of the 20th century, as popular in his day as any athlete who has ever lived.

The crowd rose as one to stare at the horse, and the horse, as was his custom, stared back.

It was 4:35 p.m. on Oct. 7, 1905, a brilliant fall Thursday at the Breeders Track in Lexington, Ky., and Dan Patch, a big mahogany-brown pacer, had just finished an attempt to lower his own world record for the mile. He was still blowing hard, but after wheeling around and jogging back to the finish line -- on his own, with no guidance or encouragement from the small, mustachioed man sitting in the racing sulky behind him -- he had come to a dead stop and, with his head cocked slightly to the left, was slowly surveying the assembled throng.

This was a trademark move, something he did not do automatically, like a circus animal mindlessly performing a trick, but often enough when the mood struck. People waited for it and felt they had gotten their money's worth when it came. Dan Patch's fans used to say -- when they talked about him in taverns and barbershops and at dinner tables all over America -- that the horse liked to count the house.

A dramatic silence fell over the scene. An official clocking would come down from the judges at any moment, and a quarter of a second either way could mean the difference between the front page and the sports section. Had Dan done the impossible once again? In the press area a finger hovered above a telegraph key.

From where the horse stood he could hear the three timers in the judges' stand, a few feet behind and about 20 feet above him, murmuring confidentially as they consulted their chronographs; if their individual hand-timings differed, as they might easily by a fraction of a second, they would have to reach a consensus on an official clocking. In an age when horse speed, and the mile record in particular, mattered to a mass audience, these racing judges were men of gravitas, doing important work. They wore suits and ties and natty straw boaters. They hefted 17-jewel stopwatches that had the power to transform a day at the races into a historic event. If Dan Patch had gone as fast as some in the packed grandstand guessed he had, everyone there would have a story to tell, maybe for the rest of his life. Tens of thousands who weren't there would also claim to have seen him power down the homestretch of the perfectly manicured red-clay racetrack in the lengthening autumn shadows.

Seconds ticked by, tension increased, but the horse, as a reporter said later, was "the calmest person on the grounds." Nine years old and at his physical peak, Dan Patch stood at almost the midpoint of a long career spent, for the most part, touring the country in a plush private railroad car and putting on exhibitions of speed. He knew the drill: First there was the Effort, the race against the clock, one mile in distance, with the galloping prompters to urge him on and stir his competitive spirit. Then there was the Silence, as judges checked their watches. After the Silence came either the Roar (a world record!) or the Sigh (alas, not this time). The Roar invariably involved flying hats and a surging wave of well-wishers.

Dan Patch preferred the Roar. Which was odd; why would a horse choose hysteria over a quiet walk back to the barn? What did he care about world records and the endless hype? The preference wasn't horselike. Dan Patch was an odd horse.

He was different, in fact, to a degree that experienced horse handlers found amazing, even hateful (jealousy being a big part of the racing game). For example, though stallions tend to be skittish, lashing out with teeth and hooves at the slightest provocation, Dan Patch -- an intact male who had already shown he had no problems in the breeding shed -- exuded calm, allowing strangers to approach him and small children to run back and forth beneath his belly. He wasn't frightened of the world human beings had made. He trusted -- a quality humans found terribly flattering and loved him for. As for the racing and touring, he seemed to get it, to understand that his job was to be this new thing in America: a superstar. Whenever he saw a photographer, he stopped.